sabotabby | Holy class war, Batman!

bcholmes and I went to see The Dark Knight Rises.

Paul Johansson, take note: This is how you make a really good movie with really reprehensible politics.

Let's get this out of the way first: Nolan's gritty, camp-free Batman movies are pretty awesome. All of his movies that I've seen are pretty awesome. They're not perfect—he can't write female characters worth a damn for the most part—but he creates rich, believable worlds and knows how to tell a good story.

The problem, though, with situating Batman in the real world is that it becomes a story about an insanely rich guy beating up the poor, the mentally ill, and people with deformities because apparently there aren't child psychiatrists in Gotham City.

I cut Nolan some slack and didn't mention politics after the last movie, because while it was totally an endorsement of Bush's policies, Heath Ledger's Joker was freaking amazing and let's be honest, that's what we all cared about. DKR is even more explicitly political; at its core, a clash between Gotham's poor and oppressed and its rich and decadent. Guess which side we're supposed to sympathize with?

So the plot is basically this: Eight years after the last movie, Gotham has enjoyed relative crime-free peace, owing to an innovative strategy of locking up criminals (Conservative Talking Point #1). Batman has taken the fall for Harvey Dent's death. Bruce Wayne, now bearded and walking with a cane, has become a recluse and has run his company into the ground. Of course, his relative drop in wealth means that it can't trickle down to benefit a home for orphan boys (Conservative Talking Point #2, no really), so we know all is not well. He's developed a clean, renewable energy MacGuffin that runs on unobtainium and was presumably stolen from one of Tony Stark's plotlines, but he's mothballed it because it can also be used to make a nuclear bomb. Um? One of his board members, Miranda Tate, is very much interested in this energy source, which is in no way suspicious and isn't because she's secretly the child of a radical environmentalist terrorist played by Liam Neeson or anything like that.

Meanwhile, Bane—part mercenary, part warlord, part anarchist, and don't think for a second the conflation of all these things is not weird and problematic—has been organizing the city's underclass in the sewers. He's working with John Daggett, Wayne's rival, to bankrupt Wayne Enterprises. Selina Kyle/Catwoman steals Wayne's fingerprints (and his mom's Pearl Necklace of Death!), allowing Bane to attack the stock market and make a bunch of risky investments using Wayne's identification. At this brazen attack on capitalism, Batman finally has to come out of hiding (Conservative Wet Dream #1).

But Bane's ultimate plan is more nefarious: He steals the nuke, breaks Batman's back, somehow gets him to a prison in Foreigncountrystan, traps every cop in the city underground, and then declares Gotham City "free." Which means that all of the bridges connecting Gotham to—whatever is outside of Gotham—are blown up and any attempt to come or go will mean he detonates the MacGuffin. Gotham is now in the hands of its people, who mainly seem interested in going after the obscenely wealthy and holding show trials conducted by—in a lulzy and wonderful cameo—Scarecrow and his pretty, pretty eyes.

And with this, we see Conservative Talking Point #3: Gotham in the hands of its people, its jails empty and its police trapped, is supposedly a bad thing. Only, it doesn't actually look that bad for the people themselves. It's obviously bad for the rich, and Owen from Torchwood gets an unceremonious execution, but as far as the unwashed masses go, they don't look any more terrorized by crime than they usually are and it certainly beats living in the sewers. So. There's that. And a scene, clearly evoking Occupy and other mass protests, where said rabble goes up against a horde of recently-freed cops. The message appears to be that poors ought to know their place and accept the leadership of their betters, no matter how sharp the class divide.

There's a lot of other confusing things in there, like what Talia al Ghul was actually out to accomplish, and whether Bane knew about it, or why, if Batman is hated and despised among all of Gotham's population except for John Blake (who was bright enough to see through Commissioner Gordon's story), the children are drawing little chalk bats everywhere. Weren't the Gotham police hopelessly corrupt in the last movie and this was why the Batman was needed in the first place? But mostly, it's the unsubtle message of the movie, which is that anti-democratic lies, draconian laws, ubiquitous surveillance, and a powerful and armed ruling class are necessary and good. It's not a betrayal of the comics—quite the opposite, as it takes the themes present in the comics to their inevitable conclusion—but it says something uncomfortable about the cultural zeitgeist that this kind of thing resonates with the very masses it disregards and condemns.

It's funny, because while the Nolan movies are praised for being serious and thought-provoking, I thought that The Avengers did a better job of depicting how ordinary people react to terror and violence in about a minute of montage than DKR did in the whole long sequence of three months under Bane's rule. Did regular folks in Gotham just hang out with machine guns at the show trials or were they hiding in their houses, or what? Did they like Bane's revolution? If not, were they trying to do anything about it? Did they find ways to organize their communities to get food and heat or what? Were they starving? We don't know, because the movie barely pays lip service to anyone but the extremely rich, their hired thugs, and the desperate, violent underclass.

I said before that it was a well-made movie, and it was. Visually, it's stunning. The acting is great. Hathaway's Catwoman is the best Catwoman on screen, ever, and the best thing about the movie. When things blow up, they blow up good. It had me interested for the whole 165 minutes. Bane isn't as cool a villain as the Joker (no one is), but he was way more fun to watch than Ra's al Ghul. The little details—Batman's physical decay from too much superheroing in particular—made the universe feel very lived-in and the characters very real.

But yeah. In the final analysis, this is a movie that thinks you're scum and isn't afraid to tell you. And that's just uncomfortable to watch.

ETA: Two more interesting reviews.

The Dark Knight Rises: Class War in the Dystopian Present:

Our first thought on leaving the theatre- what kind of society could produce a big-budget movie with such a completely hopeless message about the future of humanity and the inability of ‘the people’ to govern themselves?

'The Dark Knight' is No Capitalist:

So this is a class struggle all right, but it’s not between Bane’s pseudo-proles and Gotham’s elite with their cop army. That’s a sideshow. The struggle is within the ruling class itself, between the capitalist Daggett and the aristocratic Wayne. Wayne is far more feudalism than finance: heir to a manor complete with fawning manservant, unconcerned with business or money-making, bound by duty and honor even if it makes him a recluse.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All

From:

the_axel

Have you read Marshal Law - Kingdom of the Blind?

It's a beautiful skewering of Batman, with a real emphasis on he class warfare inherent in his character.

From:

sabotabby

That looks all kinds of awesome. I've never even heard of it.

From:

the_axel

Marshal Law has a 6 part series, and 3 or 4 standalone stories. I highly recommend them.

I saw the movie today, and holy crap are the politics awful. Thanks for the forewarning.

i'll tell you all my secrets but i'll lie about my past

Holy class war, Batman!

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